Judge denies role in Armengau sex-crimes trial

Wednesday

Jun 25, 2014 at 12:01 AMJun 26, 2014 at 11:30 AM

A Franklin County judge testified yesterday that prosecutors were reckless in including allegations of sexual misconduct against him in the sex-crimes trial of lawyer Javier Armengau. "The disciplinary rules say you shouldn't hang a judge out to dry, because it embarrasses the whole legal system," Common Pleas Judge Richard A. Frye said.

John Futty, The Columbus Dispatch

A Franklin County judge testified yesterday that prosecutors were reckless in including allegations of sexual misconduct against him in the sex-crimes trial of lawyer Javier Armengau.

“The disciplinary rules say you shouldn’t hang a judge out to dry, because it embarrasses the whole legal system,” Common Pleas Judge Richard A. Frye said.

The 65-year-old judge, who took office in 2005, was called by the defense in response to testimony by one of Armengau’s accusers.

A woman testified last week that Armengau tried to persuade her to perform oral sex on the judge, who was handling her son’s criminal cases, but she refused.

She said the incident occurred in Armengau’s Brewery District office on Aug. 25, 2008, the night before her son was to be sentenced for violating probation. She testified that Frye was present and Armengau suggested that performing the act would keep her son out of prison.

Frye testified that he has never been to Armengau’s office. Asked by defense attorney Frederick Benton if the woman’s allegation was a lie, he replied, “Absolutely 100 percent.”

Frye said that he learned of the allegation when two agents from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation came to his office on May 14, 2013. After reading a report from the agency that included a paragraph about the woman’s claim, he said he handed it back to the agents and told them, “She’s crazy.”

But he said that no one from the Ohio attorney general’s office, including the two assistant attorneys general handling Armengau’s prosecution, has contacted him about the claim since that day.

When Assistant Attorney General Daniel Breyer asked him if he thought the prosecution should have advised the woman not to mention the allegation in her testimony, Frye said prosecutors went beyond that by including her allegation in their opening statement to the jury.

“And you did it without ever talking to me or without ever looking at all the background and looking at why (the accuser) might have a number of reasons to have anger at me for sending her son to prison,” said Frye, who grew angry during the cross-examination.

Frye sentenced the woman’s son to more than five years in prison.

In response to a question from Benton, Frye said he considered using the allegation in the trial to be careless.

“All we trade on as trial judges is our reputation for fairness and hard work and trying to do justice down here,” he said. “And to have any judge thrown out as a potential recipient of a bribe, when nothing of the sort happened and there were all kinds of reasons to figure out that that would not have happened, seems to me to be reckless and improper.”

The attorney general’s office is serving as special prosecutor in the case because Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien wanted to avoid a conflict of interest for his office, which has frequently prosecuted Armengau’s clients.

Although the woman is one of Armengau’s accusers, the alleged incident involving the judge is not part of the charges in the case. Armengau, 52, is on trial for rape, sexual battery, gross sexual imposition, kidnapping and public indecency involving the woman and four other accusers, all of whom had some connection to his legal practice.

In other testimony by defense witnesses yesterday:

• Emily Huddleston, a Franklin County public defender, contradicted testimony by the same woman who made the allegation involving Frye. Huddleston testified that she represented the woman’s son on some of his cases at the sentencing hearing and spent 20 to 30 minutes talking to the woman in the lobby outside Frye’s courtroom immediately after the hearing. The woman testified last week that Armengau took her into a conference room outside the courtroom after the hearing and forced her to perform oral sex.

• One of Armengau’s former employees said that she reacted with “utter shock” to an allegation that he had groped a client’s mother and exposed himself to her in his Brewery District office on April 4, 2013. Jennifer Young testified that the woman, Catherine Collins, seemed “calm and collected” when she came down the stairs and said goodbye after the meeting ended.

Armengau was arrested six days later based on Collins’ claim that he grabbed her during the meeting and fondled her breasts before standing up and exposing his penis. “I couldn’t understand how what she was claiming could have occurred,” Young testified.

The defense will continue to call witnesses today in the courtroom of Judge David W. Fais, with Armengau likely to testify by the end of the week.

The Dispatch does not identify victims of sexual assault unless the victim agrees. Collins told her story to the newspaper last year and agreed to be named.